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Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:53:32 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: Re: Imaging libraries in active development?
From: Alasdair McAndrew <amca01@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:34050

I take your point that not being actively developed doesn't necessarily mea=
n that the software is bad - but in general healthy software is continuousl=
y updated and expanded to meet the needs of its users, or to take advantage=
 of new algorithms or hardware.

And in its current form PIL has a number of limitations: it doesn't allow l=
inear filters of arbitrary size or shape, or non-linear filters (such as me=
dian filter) of arbitrary size. There doesn't seem to be built in support f=
or standard imaging filters: Gaussian, Laplacian, LoG, edge detection, unsh=
arp masking and so on.  It doesn't seem to have support for color space con=
versions (RGB, YIQ, HSV etc).  There don't seem to be standard edge detecti=
on routines (Laplacian of Gaussian, Canny, etc).  And so on.  Now maybe som=
e of these can be found in other Python libraries, but I can't imagine I'm =
the only person who would ever want them in an imaging library.  Other libr=
aries (scipy.ndimage, scikits-image) do go a long way to addressing my conc=
erns.

Anyway, I was curious to know why PIL is lacking so much of what I would co=
nsider fairly fundamental imaging facilities, and why development seems to =
have stalled since 2009.

On Thursday, 29 November 2012 05:14:30 UTC+11, Michael Torrie  wrote:
> On 11/28/2012 05:30 AM, Alasdair McAndrew wrote:
>=20
> > I'm investigating Python for image processing (having used Matlab,
>=20
> > then Octave for some years).  And I'm spoiled for choice: PIL and its
>=20
> > fork pillow, scipy.ndimage, scikits-image, mahotas, the Python
>=20
> > interface to openCV...
>=20
> >=20
>=20
> > However, PIL doesn't seem to be in active development.  What I want
>=20
> > to know is - what are the current "standard" libraries for image
>=20
> > processing in Python which are in active development?
>=20
> >=20
>=20
> > I have quite a few image processing student notes which I'm thinking
>=20
> > of converting to Python, but I'd like to use the most up-to-date
>=20
> > library.
>=20
>=20
>=20
> I'm curious.  What features do you need that pil doesn't have?  Other
>=20
> than updating pil to fix bugs, support new image types or new versions
>=20
> of Python, what kind of active development do you think it needs to
>=20
> have? Maybe pil has all the features the original author wanted and is
>=20
> pretty stable.  To judge a package on how fast it's changing seems a bit
>=20
> odd to me.  Obviously you want to know that bugs can get fixed of
>=20
> course.  Perhaps none have been reported recently.